When major radio stations and music labels agreed to stop payola (again) a few …

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If you're one of those people who believes that US commercial radio sucks, a new study from the Future of Music Coalition (FMC) provides some empirical support as to just how it sucks. Despite vowing to change its ways, big radio programmers are amazingly conservative; much of the music they play comes from major labels, and it tends to be older (and well-known) material. Not even government consent decrees have been able to change that.

With the major labels currently pushing hard to make radio stations pay (more) to play music, it's easy to forget that only two years ago, the two groups were caught up in a big payola scandal—that is, the labels were paying the stations to push particular songs. After New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the FCC both shut down the practice, the radio stations agreed to all sorts of things, including $12.5 million in fines and a "set-aside" of 4,200 programming hours for independent artists.

So did anything change after the deals? FMC analyzed playlists from 2005 to 2008 and concluded that there has been "no measurable change in station playlist composition over the past four years." Around 85 percent of radio music comes from the major labels now, just as it did before the investigations.

If you want your indie rock, your best bet isn't to flip through the dial but to hit the Internet, where Pandora, eMusic, and Last.fm offer up everything from the craziest Animal Collective noisemaking to Tom Waits, Josh Ritter, and Arcade Fire.

FMC doesn't chalk this up to continued payola. Instead, the data "reinforce the notion made earlier that major labels' longstanding relationships with radio, and their tacit promise to devote additional resources to a release (tour support, retail placement, ads, sponsorships) incentivizes radio to play their songs more frequently than those of indie labels."

But the resistance to indies clearly comes out of a more general resistance to risk, too. When FMC analyzed national playlists from Adult Contemporary, Urban Adult Contemporary, and AAA Commercial radio in 2008, it found that "almost 50 percent of the airplay was of songs released prior to 1999." In other words, new songs aren't just competing with other new songs; they are also competing with the biggest hits of the past.

Together, these trends have produced the "cookie-cutter formats" that we see across many US radio stations. Even though independent music accounts for 30 percent of the US music market, it is woefully underrepresented on mainstream radio.

This strategy, however artistically bankrupt it was, at least made a certain kind of sense when the cash was rolling in. But programming conservatism and centralization haven't saved radio mega-owner Clear Channel from significant job cuts this week, most of them coming in programming at small and mid-sized markets. This is exactly what FMC doesn't want to happen, instead suggesting that radio's ability to thrive hangs on being "live and local."

To many station owners, though, "live and local" translates to "expensive and risky," and it's not as though national programming is somehow automatically bad (the excellent "Sound Opinions" radio show, recorded here in Chicago for NPR, illustrates the point). But the FMC study does make clear that if you want your indie rock, your best bet isn't to flip through the dial but to hit the Internet, where Pandora, eMusic, and Last.fm offer up everything from the craziest Animal Collective noisemaking to Tom Waits, Josh Ritter, and Arcade Fire.

However, if Jim & Kath's Morning Drivetime Music Blast (featuring K-Dog and the Wolfman) is your sort of thing... well, mainstream radio will continue to deliver.